Sprint Will Bail on LightSquared If No FCC Nod by March

Vmac39 said:
Really? I'm no fan of Sprint but, they've been trying to work out a deal with Light Squared for sometime now. I can't imagine that they would want the deal to fall through but, they can't wait too much longer and hope that LS can gain the FCC's approval. It's not good business and the competition isn't waiting for them. Sprint is already late in the game deploying LTE. Besides, who exactly will they get help from to build out, if the FCC doesn't give LS approval?

I'm no fan of Sprint either but competition is always good in the industry. Sprint is just poorly mismanaged and they make bad decisions. Dan Hesse needs to step down.

I feel that Sprint made a terrible mistake investing in WiMAX. The rest of the industry was going LTE. Sprint knew of this and still went with WiMAX anyway. Don't get me wrong, I thought at first it was an interesting move. Sprint has always been known to try different things. WiMAX is not a bad technology. It's just the band that it's been designed to be used on that sucks.

Sprint deployed WiMAX on their existing towers only but they needed double the amount of towers to cover an existing 3G area due to lower power output from the tower and the 2.5GHz frequency. This left gaps in WiMAX coverage which meant poor building penetration.

As for LTE, Sprint has 1900MHz G-block spectrum that will be used solely for it's LTE services. I assume this will be a 10x10 MHz configuration?? They should be ok for now. I always thought Sprint should use their ESMR spectrum for LTE but I read they only want to use it for CDMA 1x Advanced. I guess this could provide more coverage to fringe areas but LTE is the future. Even MetroPCS has stressed converting entirely to an LTE only system using VoLTE. Must be a technical reason as to why they can't use ESMR for LTE. Haven't read up on it.